Draw attention with a vignette
Employ this subtle effect in Lightroom or Camera Raw to direct the viewer’s eye
Vignetting refers to the darkening of corners in an image. When I first got into photography, all I’d see of this phenomenon was terrible 1970s portraits. These gave me an instant dislike of the technique, and I dismissed any possibility of ever using vignettes in my photos. Fast-forward a few years to my first exhibition, however, and every photo had a vignette to some extent. In the intervening years, I’d found that I could actually use vignettes to creatively draw attention to what I wanted to highlight in my photo.
In most photos, your eye is naturally drawn to the brightest part of a photo. If you’ve got competing areas of brightness, the eye jumps between them, which can make a photo fail. If these areas are on the edge of the photo, using the Post Crop Vignetting Tool in the Effects Panel can really help to fix this.
Take our leaf here. The backlight helps to highlight it, and lifts the colour. It’s also doing this with the grass, which competes for attention. Let’s reduce this.